The 90-minute event will be streamed live from New York's Pier 36 event space. The ceremony airs on the US East Coast at 6 pm (2300 GMT).

The YouTube Music Awards joins a variety of other industry awards such as the Grammys, MTV Video Music Awards and American Music Awards.

"The winners will be decided by fans whose sharing activity this week and last will be tallied right up to Sunday night's show," YouTube wrote in a Friday blog post.

Nominees were determined based "on a series of viewership, subscriber, and/or engagement metrics," Google's Youtube said.

YouTube will award performers in six categories: artist of the year, video of the year, innovation of the year, response of the year (for videos that remixed or parodied), YouTube breakthrough and YouTube phenomenon (for trend-setting videos).

The clips nominated for video of the year have pulled in a combined total of 1.9 billion views, according to YouTube's blog.